Having dealt with many family members just like this, I can tell you they certainly can use Google for search, they just don't want to. When forced to they use it fine.

If I were to guess, a lot of people, particularly older people, see computer use outside the web browser as an amateur might a chop-saw; a dangerous tool not to be used by inexperienced hands, so an AI that can also directly do the tasks for them might solve that problem (assuming it came preinstalled or someone else did that for them). Though then comes the question of whether they'd be willing to pay for it

> Give your neighbors something like Alexa powered with better AI

Didn't they literally try this and it failed miserably?

"Alexa but better" is not a profitable business. Amazon profits from Alexa being in people's homes, not from people buying Alexa.

Based on my experience, you’re right. I know a woman in her late 60s that is basically tech illiterate (can barely send an email), and she has been making effective use of the ChatGPT free plan. AI has been helping her cut through the noise of navigating the web in 2026 (which in her defense is often a bewildering experience). It can’t help her with everything yet, but it’s a clear boost to her independence online.

In the US, roughly 95% of AI users do not pay for it. So, they are sold, but only for the free tier. Technology is there, money are not.

I'd say the exact opposite. People who have no idea how technology works shouldn't touch AI at all. "AI can understand human language" is fundamentally false, and it leads people to actually believe AI is "AI" and not just a token predictor.

These people WILL fall victim of their own ignorance and upload all their private information to an AI chatbot.

There is no "honest" AI though. It is always biased towards its prompt and ultimately its training data.

Compare flights? You have to assume it is objective and not tainted by corporate bias or backroom deals(aka ads and sponsored content), unless you selfhost and find an objective model.

Search Wikipedia? You have to constantly check that it is giving you straight facts instead of being constrained by its community and safety guidelines.

The problem with so many of these usecases is treating AI as a super intelligent Vulcan who is always logical and objective aka Spock, when we are better off treating it as if it is a salesman.

Also, their neighbors are also the exact exemplars of what two generations later will look like. There isn't a lot of hard data on what AI usage might look like, but there is data on tech literacy, and the numbers are clear: We trained precisely -ONE- generation that actually understands computers. The incoming one will happily gobble up all the AI, same way they gobbled up willful ignorance of filesystems. Much like there is a button that corresponds to "gimme shot videos", there will be a button that corresponds to "Listen to what I'm about to say, and do it".

Demand will not stop in the next 20 years.

i dont know about that, they could've adopted using google which you could already search things in pretty much natural language and even got youtube snippets how fix your problem... so i'm not convinced they will adopt

Now tell them it costs $100/month and, eh, not so much.

> AI can understand human language.

It is a bit comical how the HN crowd spent the last number of decades trying to convince the audience that a programmer's value was actually in their system thinking, not their arcane knowledge of a particular language, but now that the language barrier is removed it turns out it was just the arcane language knowledge after all...

Although I'd posit that the old school HNers were the ones actually right. From what I see in the average Joes is that, while they can communicate with AI, they don't really see how to leverage it. Granted, the younger generations grew up in a school system that tried to promote system thinking more so than in the past, so that gap will likely shrink over time.